


Educational Visit

by El Staplador (elstaplador)



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Alien Planet, F/F, Gen, Handwavium, Reference to Vomit, School Trip, Sonic Screwdriver, Timey-Wimey, date
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-06
Updated: 2019-02-06
Packaged: 2019-10-23 14:51:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,057
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17685566
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elstaplador/pseuds/El%20Staplador
Summary: A message encoded in the blinking of a pulsar can come from only person that the Doctor knows... but why is she summoning her to the visitor centre at Drewett's Nebula Falls?





	Educational Visit

**Author's Note:**

  * For [NancyBrown](https://archiveofourown.org/users/NancyBrown/gifts).



'Well,' said the Doctor, ' _that_ shouldn't be happening.'

Yaz joined her at the monitor. 'What shouldn't? That flashy star?'

'Yeah. Well, it's a pulsar; I'd expect it to flash. But not like this.'

'What should it be doing?' Ryan asked.

'It should be very quick but regular. On-off-on-off-on-off... But much quicker than that, obviously. Instead, we've got these long flashes, then short ones, then nothing, then a whole '

'So what's going on, do you think?' Yaz asked.

'Somebody's sending a message,' the Doctor said. 'And I think I know who it might be.'

Ryan said, excitedly, 'I had a mate at school, he was into all that kind of stuff. And he told me once that some of the Morse code operators could recognise each other by their style.'

'Yeah,' the Doctor said. She smiled. 'It's a bit like that.'

  
The TARDIS made short work of decrypting the message. The Doctor raised her eyebrows when she read it. 'Drewett's Nebula Falls, eh?'

'What's that, then?' Graham asked.

'It's the biggest tourist attraction this side of GN-Z11. Looks a bit like a waterfall if you squint. It's got a visitor centre and everything.'

'And your contact wants you to go there? Why?'

The Doctor shook her head. 'She says, _something I think you ought to see_. She'll have her reasons.'

  
They found when they got out that the TARDIS had landed itself neatly in a bay marked _Private Ships: Capacity 5000-∞_.

'So,' said the Doctor. 'Here we are.' She looked at the parking charges and winced.

'So what happens now?' Ryan asked. 'Do we wait for your contact or what?'

'Where's the fun in that? Let's investigate. We'll meet at the café in two hours. Ryan. Why don't you and Yaz take the psychic paper and go and have a look at the visitor centre? Try and keep an eye out for anything unusual.' She glanced at Graham, who was casting a professional eye over the dock. 'Graham. You look like a man with an idea.'

He nodded. 'I was thinking that I might have a chat with some of the drivers... Pilots, I mean. See if any of them have noticed anything. And what are you going to do, Doc?'

'I,' said the Doctor, 'am going to go and find out what that message was all about.'

  
The ticket hall was high and echoing, with a transparent roof that let in the ever-changing light of the nebula. Yaz and Ryan found the shortest-looking queue and reminisced as the floor moved them smoothly towards the ticket desks.

'Do you remember when we went on that school trip to Chatsworth?' Ryan asked Yaz.

'Yes! And Ali was sick on the bus there _and_ the bus back!'

'Ali was always sick,' Ryan said, nostalgically. 'Every time.'

'Ew, yeah. Was that the time that Katie trod in it?'

'No, that was Jodrell Bank. Hey, bet you never thought then that we'd be... well, wherever this is.'

'That,' Yaz said, 'is very true. I didn't.'

The floor moved them another metre further forward. The family in front of them shimmered and vanished through the portal. Ryan displayed the psychic paper as nonchalantly as he could manage.

The attendant looked faintly appalled. 'You didn't need to queue, Your Excellencies!'

'Oh, well,' Yaz said. 'We didn't want to make a fuss, you know?'

'No, no, of course!' They looked slightly more appalled.

'How about,' Ryan suggested, 'if we just wander round? We don't want you to treat us any differently than you would anybody else.'

'Yes. Of course. Do come this way, won't you...'

They stepped forward, and the air around them was suddenly warm and suddenly cold, and then they were standing in a long, cool, dark corridor, with a faint point of light at the far end.

Ryan and Yaz peered at each other in the gloom.

'Well,' Yaz said. 'I guess we head that way.'

Ryan shrugged his shoulders. 'I guess we do.'

  
Graham sauntered down the long lanes of the dock, glancing at each ship as he passed. Some of them were empty. In others, the cockpits were occupied, the pilots napping in their seats, or watching some kind of video, or reading from screens. Some of them noticed him, and made gestures of greeting. He nodded back. The trick, he knew, was not looking too interested. Sooner or later there'd be somebody who was bored enough to talk.

The _somebody_ was the pilot of a tired-looking silver-coloured passenger vessel, an alien with translucent purple skin that seemed almost viscous. When Graham caught her eye, she waved a tentacle and opened her window. 'Hey, mate.'

Graham nodded. 'How's it going?'

'Oh, you know. Massive congestion around Phlurming III, and then I had to stop for a tacho break at Worliz. What about you?'

'I'm not actually driving,' Graham said. 'A mate of mine got sent here unexpectedly and I went along for the ride.'

'Oh, I see,' the alien said. 'Commercial/tourist space-pilot's holiday, is that it?'

'That's it,' Graham agreed. He nodded at the glorious glow of the sky. 'Worse places to go.'

'Oh, it's nice enough to look at, I'll give you that. But we always get complaints. People _don't come back_.'

'So what's new?'

'No, I mean they _don't come back from here_.'

'Oh,' said Graham. 'Oh.'

  
'I knew it was going to be you,' the Doctor said.

Professor River Song rolled her eyes. 'I should hope you did.'

'Who else vandalises a pulsar to say, _Meet me in the gift shop?_ '

'I got you a keyring.' River held it out in the palm of her hand, and, when the Doctor moved forward to take it, she pulled her forward and kissed her.

An old impulse made her twine her hands in River's curly hair. She almost had to reach up to do it, now. The change wasn't unpleasant. Not at all...

Somebody whooped. The Doctor couldn't blame them. River stepped back, smiling. 'It's been a while.'

'You never told me about _this_ ,' the Doctor said, gesturing at herself.

River grinned. 'I expect I'll decide to give you the same delightful surprise that I've just had.'

The Doctor grinned back. 'You say the nicest things.'

'I know.'

The Doctor cleared her throat. 'So what's going on here?'

  
Yaz and Ryan had obediently followed the long dark corridor through what turned out to be an educational display about the origins of the nebula, the history of the family business that now had control of it, and a virtual reality envisioning of what might happen to it in millennia to come. It all seemed normal enough, if on a much grander scale than anything they'd visited on a Redlands Primary School trip. It wasn't until they turned a corner into a suddenly bright room, and felt the floor lurch under them that anything seemed to be wrong.

'Ryan,' Yaz whispered, 'did you feel that?'

'Yeah,' he whispered back. 'I did. Why are we whispering? It's not like nobody's going to be able to see us, in here.'

'I dunno; it just feels like the right thing to do.'

The space was vast and bright and very, very still. Their breath hardly seemed to disturb the air at all. If, Ryan caught himself thinking, it was air.

'You know,' Yaz whispered, 'it's really quite pleasant here. I could just go to sleep.'

He said, more loudly than he'd meant to, 'I really don't think you should.'

Yaz nodded. It looked like an effort. 'What I don't like,' she said drowsily, 'is the way the floor isn't there any more.'

Ryan bit off a yelp. She was right: it wasn't. 'I can't see where we came in,' he said.

She squinted. 'I can...'

'Yaz! Don't fall asleep on me!'

'I'm not...' She tipped sideways.

He reached out and shook her shoulder.

'Sorry... Look, just pinch me or something, OK?'

'OK. I'm going to hold your hand. Where's the door?'

They started moving forward, in a motion that was somewhere between walking and swimming. He could only hope that Yaz was leading them in the right direction. He couldn't see any variation at all in the brightness around them.

  
The Doctor and River met Graham on their way out of the gift shop. 'Graham! This is Professor Song. River. My wife. Sent the message.'

Graham raised his eyebrows, and then nodded. 'Right. Something to do with visitors going missing, by any chance?'

'That does seem to have been happening,' River said.

He said, pleasantly, 'So should we find out where Ryan and Yaz have got to?'

'That,' said the Doctor, 'would be a very good idea.'

River nodded. 'Come with me. I've got a theory about what's been happening.'

They followed her through a door marked _Staff Only_ and down a corridor lit by discreet glowing bars.

'What I think,' River said, 'is that somebody's miscalculated somewhere in the Real Virtual Reality complex, and any visitor who steps through the door at the wrong angle gets whisked off to another direction.

' _Another dimension_?' Graham exclaimed.

'Oh, well, if that's all it is it should be easy enough to reverse,' the Doctor said. She took her sonic screwdriver out of her trouser pocket and rolled it between her hands. 'Any idea where the control box is?'

River smiled patiently. 'Of course.'

  
Graham had no idea what the Doctor was doing. He thought it best not to interrupt her. River, too, was standing well back, lolling against the door and telling a long story about an archaeological dig somewhere around Betelgeuse. The Doctor wasn't really listening, if the constant stream of sparks and fizzing and the occasional exasperated exclamation was anything to go by. Nor was Graham, who was too worried about Ryan.

'And of course,' River was saying, 'that was when the grave robbers found that someone had put sugar in...' She broke off. 'What do you want?'

Graham hadn't noticed the Doctor doing or saying anything different, but he supposed that River had known her longer.

'Hold _this_ down,' the Doctor said, 'and Graham, can you give that panel there a good push while I just... Yes, that's it!' She twisted the screwdriver and the whole wall shook and juddered; then, suddenly, a perfect square of bright light appeared in the middle of it. It was gone almost as soon as it came, but Ryan and Yaz were there too.

Graham hugged Ryan, and Ryan hugged him back, and this seemed to be OK with both of them. Yaz, blinking drowsily, looked from the Doctor to River and back again.

'Oh,' said the Doctor. 'Yeah. This is Yaz. This is Ryan. You two, this is Professor River Song. My wife.'

'Hello,' Yaz said shyly.

River flashed a dazzling smile at both of them. 'Lovely to meet you.'

'You too,' said Ryan.

'What about everyone else?' Graham asked. 'Apparently there have been reports of missing visitors coming in for months.'

'We didn't see anybody else,' Ryan said. 'And to be honest, it's not easy to find your way out.'

The Doctor looked troubled. 'If they went in months ago, they'll probably come out months from now. Nothing we can do about that. But I've fixed the settings so that they'll come out in the viewing hall.'

Ryan shrugged. 'Let's get out of here, then. After all that I want a postcard, at least.'

'I want a sit down on something that's not going to disappear under me,' said Yaz.

'I want a cup of tea,' said Graham. 'Come on, you two. This is the way the rest of us came in.'

  
'Well,' the Doctor said, 'better get on and pay my parking ticket.'

'Oh, no,' River said. 'Interesting as all that was, it wasn't why I asked you here.'

'Oh,' said the Doctor, ' _wasn't_ it?'

'No,' said River. She took the Doctor's arm. 'I thought we could have dinner at the Restaurant Under The Nebula, and dance until we got tired of perpetual night, and then... well, maybe we could make the most of that perpetual night.'

'Right,' the Doctor said. Ahead, Ryan and Graham and Yaz were waiting for them at the door to the gift shop. She called, 'I'll see you three back at the TARDIS.' And then she paused, caught River's eye, and added, 'You needn't wait up for me.'


End file.
